I've long been interested in astronomy (looking through telescopes, that is) and photography, but always resisted astrophotography. Too time-consuming, too expensive, and I knew I could never get results that compare with what serious guys get.


But with the 5D II and live view to make focusing easy, I coudln't resist attaching the thing to my little telescope to see what I got.


The sensor is so sensitive, I can see dim stars with live view. A 10 second exposure at iso 12800 is enough to see if the object is where I want it in the field. The results, while falling far short of what "real astrophotographers" get, were better than I expected.


http://picasaweb.google.com/jonruyle/Astro#


Or:





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Orion Nebula 4 min 800mm f/8 ISO 800








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M51 2min 800mm f/8 ISO 1600








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Comet Lulin 1 min 800mm f/8 ISO 1600








The real surprise, though, was not the results, but how much fun it was. I was up three nights in a row, and got up at 4am a couple of days ago to catch comet Lulin.


Keep in mind that these are all short exposures. (In picassa, click "more info" on the right to see the stats ). I used no autoguiding or stacking. My inexpensive em-2 mount and fs102 refractor were both designed for visual use, not photography. I used no fancy image processing (no maximum entropy, no lucy-richardson), no frozen ccds. Worse yet, no skill . All I had going for me was the 5D II and a little takahashi refractor. I'll bet the serious guys get awesome results with this camera.